Centre Theatre nears reopening
March 2, 2015 | Baltimore Sun
Baltimore, MD (March 2, 2015) – When Baltimore developer Charlie Duff placed the winning bid on a vacant former theater in Station North, it looked like the possible setting of an Indiana Jones movie: Green mold grew on surfaces throughout the building, a tree sprouted through the middle of a staircase.
Three years and $18.5 million later, the Centre remains a place where movies might be made — but now as renovated offices set to house film departments for the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Johns Hopkins University, among other tenants.
On Tuesday, Duff’s nonprofit development firm, Jubilee Baltimore, plans to light the old movie marquee in celebration of the nearly complete rehabilitation of 10 E. North Ave. The first of the new occupants, Neighborhood Housing Services, is scheduled to move in next month.
Opened around 1913 as a car dealership, the Centre operated as a theater from 1939 to 1959, with a 1,000-seat auditorium and a radio station that hosted live performances. The building later became a check-processing center for Equitable Trust Co. and a church before going to auction in 2012.
Duff said he had no plans for the building when he purchased it for $93,000, except to make it contribute to efforts by nearby universities, neighborhood groups and businesses to develop the arts district and strengthen the Central Baltimore corridor.
“We knew that we wanted the building to be a part of a vibrant Station North. We didn’t know anything else,” said Duff, whose Jubilee Baltimore has worked on the rehab of hundreds of rowhouses as well as the nearby housing for artists at the City Arts building and was invited to participate by another neighborhood group working in the area.
This is Jubilee Baltimore’s first project without a residential component and its single-most expensive, with financing cobbled together from sources that include roughly $6.5 million in state and federal historic tax credits and investments by Chase Bank, Philadelphia-based Reinvestment Fund and Telesis Corp., the latter two of which have redevelopment projects nearby.